Dirty Feed

Remembering.

Published 17th August 2022

Every generation discovers the same thing. As you get older, you have to deal with more and more people you know getting ill, or dying. Over the last few years, I’ve very much started to experience this.

So it was the other day, when I learnt the sad news of the death of Phil Reed. Phil was someone I’d mostly lost contact with over the last few years, though we did share some DMs a few months back about the possibility of him moving over to the UK. (A melancholic conversation all in itself, now.) But in the late 2000s, we got to know each other quite well, initially through Red Dwarf fandom, and then a little more broadly. And when I mooted the idea for a site which eventually became Noise to Signal back in 2005, he was an obvious person to get involved.

I’ve written about Noise to Signal on here before. A group blog where a bunch of friends all talked about media stuff we loved (and occasionally hated), it never quite took off, despite being published for a total of four full years until the end of 2009. In the end, we were all talking about slightly different things, and the site never quite coalesced into something that truly worked.

But that wasn’t through a lack of effort from Phil Reed, who was one of the most prolific contributors to the site, writing far more than I ever did. Phil clearly viewed the site and his work on it with some fondness; the name of his own site, Noiseless Chatter, was partly a reference to the old Noise to Signal. (Warning: his last post on that site is him saying goodbye; don’t click on that link without being prepared for it.)

Which is one reason that I felt especially bad that in the aftermath of Phil’s death, Noise to Signal was actually offline. When the site closed back in 2009, I made a point of saying the archives would remain available, and indeed they did for many years. Unfortunately, I was right in the middle of changing web hosts for all my old, legacy sites, and it took rather longer than I was planning. The result: a large chunk of his work from the late noughties wasn’t available for people to read.

Luckily, I’ve managed to bodge Noise to Signal back online. It really didn’t seem like an appropriate time for any of Phil’s work to be unavailable. And the reason for that is obvious: when someone who is known for their writing dies, one way people like to remember them is by revisiting their old work. I suspect a great many of us have gone back and read some of Phil’s writing over the past week. Sure, you can coax the Wayback Machine into giving you a version of the site, but it’s inevitably a less smooth experience, and it’s also not as easy to access. I couldn’t bear the idea of people wanting to read some of Phil’s old work for the site, and not being able to do so.

Family and close friends have photos, or other, more intangible memories. But if you’ve just read someone from afar – like a great many of people did with Phil Reed’s work – your relationship with them might not be with a photo, or with a personal memory of them in real life. It might be with a slice of their brain that they put online, which you responded to… and don’t want to lose.

And all this goes beyond people wanting to read Phil’s work right now, and speaks to a wider kind of responsibility. I’ve spoken many times about how I think people should keep their own writing online, but as I’ve always admitted, that is surely a discussion you have to have in your own head. But if you’re the custodian of an archive of someone else’s work, as I have ended up being with Noise to Signal, then things surely get a lot more complex.

There is, to be clear, no legal responsibility. But surely there has to be a question of a moral responsibility to keep a dead author’s work available for people to read and remember them by. And this is a particular issue for people like me and my friends, where we have done that weird thing: write for free on the internet. A commercial book can go out of print; that has its own issues, but is a different kind of problem. Closer, perhaps, is the idea of print fanzines in decades past: but there was surely no expectation for people to keep paper copies of an old author’s work, available to send out at all times.

With the web, keeping people’s memories of someone alive through their work is easier. To be sure, there are still costs and technical issues to consider, and I’m not thrilled with the idea that in 20 years, I might still have to spend time figuring out how to keep the archives of Noise to Signal online. But it’s far more possible to do so than it was in decades past. And the idea of letting someone’s work slip offline just doesn’t feel right, when that work is one of the ways that person lives on in people’s memories. And if that sounds overblown, well, I suspect that Phil of all people knew damn well the power that words could have on somebody.

So yes: every generation discovers the power of loss as they get older. But the brand new thing for my generation is being the custodian of public things which help people deal with that loss. It’s a responsibility that none of us signed up for… but is impossible to ignore.

After all, Noise to Signal contains the writing of more than one deceased person that people might like to remember.

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Join the Dots

Published 6th August 2022

TV Comedy

It’s odd how things in your life can suddenly connect, completely unexpectedly.

Take the Red Dwarf episode “Timeslides” (TX: 12/12/89), which I’ve already written about recently. Short version of the plot: Kryten finds some photographic developing fluid which has mutated, and it now makes photographs come to life. Interestingly, this is one of the few times the series actually uses the fact things have been sitting around on the ship for three million years, and odd things might happen during that time.

But before we get into the meat of the episode proper – Lister going back and changing his own history – we get a series of gags about the kind of things you could do with the concept of living photos. So as well as causing trouble at Rimmer’s brother’s wedding, or pondering what they could do with a set of naughty beach photographs, we get the following amusing idea.

What if Lister had sent some photos to be developed, and got someone’s skiing holiday snaps back by mistake?

The official Red Dwarf site offers the following amusing titbit about this scene:

“But even the writers aren’t infallible, as Timeslides clearly proved. As production on the episode began, the scene where Lister claims he got somebody’s skiing holiday picture back by mistake was discovered to have an error by none other than Craig. The skiers had scripted lines about how they got Lister’s rather scary birthday snaps – which would have been fine, except, at that point in time, the skiers would not have received them yet. The lines were summarily cut.”

Very good Craig, well done. But this is no longer my favourite fact about this scene.

* * *

Recently, I’ve been doing some research on the very first Spitting Image book, published in 1985. Not that it was new to me. It was a favourite of mine as a teenager in the 90s. I once lent a girl my copy of it in one of my last years at secondary school, who I then proceeded to fail to have sex with.¹

Now, I knew that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor wrote Red Dwarf; even back then, I was as interested in who wrote something as who starred in it.² I also vaguely knew that they had something to do with Spitting Image, and clocked their names mentioned in the book. These days, I know all about how Grant Naylor essentially waded in halfway through Series 1 of Spitting Image and saved the show, but I didn’t really know the details at the time.

Nor did I notice the following. One of the double page spreads in that first Spitting Image book is a parody of teen photo story magazines; specifically, My Guy. They did a bloody good job too; the layout is identical. Click/tap for a bigger version:

But hang on, what’s that silliness, happening right at the end of the strip?

Yes, the story falls apart, because… the wrong film came back from the chemist, and they got some skiing holiday snaps instead!

Which is fascinating for all kinds of reasons. Partly because of something else I posted about recently; about how easily some of Red Dwarf‘s supposedly science fiction ideas turn out not to be rooted in science fiction at all. It’s also interesting because it specifically marks the photo story parody as being at least partially the hand of Grant Naylor; none of the individual pages in the book have author credits.

But most of all, I love it because I’ve always loved that Spitting Image book. Like The Young Ones spinoff book Batchelor Boys, it was part of my comedy education growing up; a way of experiencing the show without the cost of endless blank tapes, or expensive commercial videos. Yet somehow, I’d never linked that skiing joke in the photo story to the Red Dwarf moment before, despite the knowledge that Grant Naylor worked on both shows. A brand new path suddenly opened up in my brain, connecting two things completely unexpectedly.

I find it utterly delightful.

Most of my teenage anecdotes end like this. I did once lend a girl a copy of Craig Charles’ The Log, in exchange for a feel of her breasts. This is the best thing that book ever achieved for anybody. ↩
If I’m honest, it still bemuses me today that everybody doesn’t think like this. ↩

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red dwarf, spitting image

Broken Dreams

Published 30th July 2022

TV Comedy

Discussing the influences and antecedents of Red Dwarf can be tricky. Do we look at the show in terms of its science fiction, or as a sitcom?

In terms of science fiction, albeit comic science fiction, Dark Star is the big one. The idea of having normal people rather than heroes, and in particular its portrayal of working class people in space, seems to have originated here for Grant Naylor. Alien also feeds into this, along with influencing many sets in the show, not to mention all the shenanigans in “Polymorph”. Holly clearly has his roots in HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey¹, and so does the first opening theme tune.

As for pure sitcom, there’s the classic “Steptoe and Son in space”, which is often thrown around as an early concept for the show. Porridge is also endlessly mentioned, in terms of the claustrophobic situation between characters which the show was trying to evoke. All of this is certainly true, but with the odd honourable exception, there’s typically very little analysis beyond mentioning a TV show or film, along with a one line description.

And then there’s Hancock’s Half Hour. A show which doesn’t immediately spring to mind when talking about Red Dwarf. Yet the episode “The Tycoon” (TX: 13/11/59) has a number of remarkable similarities to the Red Dwarf episode “Better Than Life” (TX: 13/9/88), broadcast nearly thirty years later. Moreover, I don’t just mean in terms of character work – the main plot beats of the episode are broadly identical, despite “Better Than Life” seemingly hanging off a science fiction idea which Hancock would find impossible to replicate.

Rather than vague hand-waving or simplistic single line reductions, let’s take a look at both episodes in detail, shall we?

[Read more →]

A fact made more obvious by looking at Red Dwarf‘s precursor “Dave Hollins: Space Cadet” in Radio 4’s Son of Cliché, featuring… Hab. ↩

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originally on G&T, red dwarf

Party of One

Published 20th July 2022

Life / Meta

It was in a field aged 18 when I finally realised just how boring I was.

It was a party. One of those all-day parties that teenagers are supposed to have a great time at. Moreover, it was an all-night party too. My friend was pretty cool. His family owned a farm, so we could pitch tents in one of the fields and sleep over. I don’t know how much sex happened in those tents. I wasn’t invited to those. I do know there was some fingering going on. I wasn’t invited to that, either.

It was an odd mix of people at those parties. I had the fortune – or perhaps misfortune – to fall in with a vaguely cool crowd, without being remotely cool myself. This could make things fun. It could also mean you spent a long time looking around you, feeling vaguely inadequate. As for who was there: it was a real mix. There were nice people there, there were utter dicks, there were nice people pretending to be utter dicks, and there were utter dicks pretending to be nice. I’m sure everyone has grown up and is lovely now.¹

But at this party, I was particularly at a loss. There were just too many people. Sometimes these parties were smaller affairs, but with this one, everyone had managed to show up. Including loads of people I’d never met before. I worked best in small groups; put me with too many people, and I used to freeze up entirely.

Not to matter. I’d managed to find myself part of a circle, with the nerd group. The computer guys. Surely I could be happy here? The party’s host admonished us; we should stop being sad and go and talk to other people, rather than take the easy way out. I don’t think we listened. It was scary out there.

Except I had a problem. What had felt like a safe group turned out to be anything but. They all knew far more about computer stuff than I did. I very rapidly came to the conclusion that I had nothing to say to these people. I mean, literally: nothing. What possible thing could I actually say? They knew far more than I did about any given topic that might have cropped up. I had sod all to offer.

I have rarely felt more alone than at that moment. If I had nothing to say to the computer nerd gang, I had even less to say to everyone else. I suddenly became acutely aware of how utterly boring I was. I knew nothing, I had no interesting ideas, I couldn’t even talk about stuff I liked with any kind of wit.

I felt… empty.

* * *

I get the idea that looking back, I’m supposed to say that I wasn’t really that boring after all. That everyone is pretending to be interesting at 18 – or 28, or 38 – and that nobody else at that party was more interesting than I was.

There’s an element of truth to that, sure. There was no doubt a lot of posturing from others going on. But I don’t think my appraisal of myself was completely off the mark either. When I was 18, I really didn’t have very much of interest to say. More to the point, there were very definitely loads of people at that party who were more engaging than I was.² And I really did know jack shit about computers compared to others there, my supposed area of interest. If I was harsh on myself at the time, I wasn’t entirely incorrect either.

Am I better now, over two decades on? Yes, better. But not perfect. Sometimes, the spectre of that party will suddenly make itself very obvious indeed. And I’ve dealt with that in various different ways over the years. Certainly, the shortcut of just saying something shocking is something I’ve dragged out rather too often in the past. Sometimes, it was actually funny and worth it. Sometimes, it was… not. A few particular memories of when it was not aren’t stories I’m going to bring out in polite company, Or indeed any company.

But even without resorting to that, I can struggle my way through nowadays better than any other time in my life. I’m not brilliant. But I manage. Just.

* * *

I sometimes think I post too much here on Dirty Feed. This didn’t use to be the case; there have been times when I’ve struggled to find the time or energy for this place. But not any more. And over the past few years, even when I’ve tried to take a break, I’ve spectacularly failed to do so.

Most obviously, this happened at the start of 2021, where I wanted to put the site on hiatus and do something else for a bit… and then didn’t. But even last month, I tried to take a smaller break, and just couldn’t manage it. I was back posting here just two weeks later.

There are lots of reasons why I find it hard to step away from here, both good and bad. But one big reason is that I eventually figured out how to write in a way that some people find interesting. Certainly not to all people, or even to most people. I’m interesting to a vanishingly small number, really. But that number is still enough to make me happy.

Because while I manage to write things that people find interesting here, I can battle those demons of when I was 18… and the least interesting person who ever lived. And if I squint, maybe it can feel like I won.

Just briefly.

I am not sure of this at all. ↩
What’s the difference between being interesting, and pretending to be interesting? Not that much, especially when you’re 18. ↩

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writing

The Laughing Vulcan

Published 15th July 2022

Other TV

It’s funny how an anecdote can be mostly correct, and yet give entirely the wrong impression of an event.

So it is with this story from Cliff Bole, the most prolific director of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with a full 25 episodes to his name. Recently, I was reading this interview with Bole on the official Star Trek site. And something stood out to me as an obvious little mystery.

How much interaction did you have with Gene Roddenberry?

Initially, quite a bit. We met two or three times a week, creatively. He gave his input and, of course, I gave my input. I had quite a bit of Roddenberry, and with Rick and the rest of the group. Roddenberry was totally committed to it. I did one episode with a Spock-like character in it, and this character laughed. Roddenberry saw the dailies and said, “That was the biggest mistake you ever made.” I said, “Well, I was only following the script, because it was written.” Vulcans don’t laugh or smile, but it got by everybody. This laugh was kind of a broad laugh, but it was written. Anyway, we did a retake of it and it was fine, and it never happened again, I can assure you. But that was Roddenberry who picked it out.

All very interesting. Of course, Bole didn’t actually give us any of the useful information in order to identify the scene, like the name of the episode or anything. We’re forced to do the donkeywork for ourselves.

Luckily, it doesn’t end up being too difficult. Bole clearly says this happened at the beginning of his time on TNG: all we have to do is find which of his early episodes had a Vulcan in it. This turns out to be “Conspiracy” (TX: 9/5/88)¹, late in Season 1, and the third episode Bole directed.

Ah, yes, the notorious “Conspiracy”, where Picard and gang foil a parasitic invasion of Starfleet. It’s one of my favourite kinds of Star Trek, alongside episodes like DS9’s “Valiant” (TX: 6/5/98) and especially Voyager’s “Course: Oblivion” (TX: 3/3/99), where being doom-laden and unpleasant is a huge part of the point. Cue much discussion of packing head moulds with real meat and blowing them up.

But we’re interested in a different kind of transgression. “Conspiracy” features a Vulcan named Savar, played by Henry Darrow. At no point in the episode does he laugh, but that’s as expected: according to Bole, the moment was reshot due to Roddenberry’s objections. But remember: Bole does claim that the laughing moment was in the original script.

And here’s where we get lucky. Brilliantly, every single script for TNG is available online. And I really do mean script, not transcript. These are the actual drafts used for production, stage directions and all.

So, does a Vulcan laugh in the script for “Conspiracy”, or is it all a load of rubbish?²

[Read more →]

All TX dates in this article are of the first US broadcast. ↩
Excerpt reformatted for ease-of-reading here. ↩

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star trek

Tales From BBC North West’s Scene Dock

Published 10th July 2022

Children's TV / TV Comedy

Sometimes, if I put on my magenta-tinted spectacles, I think that the most fun I ever had with Red Dwarf was in 1994. That was the very first time I watched the series, and indeed the very first time the show had been repeated from the beginning at all. So I could blithely enjoy the show without being troubled by what other people thought of it… or specifically, what the writers thought of it.

So the fact that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor hated the grey sets by production designer Paul Montague in the first two series of Dwarf was unknown to me. I really liked them. I also liked the new sets from Series III onwards, by Mel Bibby. I just… liked Red Dwarf an awful lot. And Grant Naylor poking fun at the sets of their own show in Me² (TX: 21/3/88) entirely passed me by.

LISTER: But why are they painting the corridor the same colour it was before?
RIMMER: They’re changing it from Ocean Grey to Military Grey. Something that should’ve been done a long time ago.
LISTER: Looks exactly the same to me.
RIMMER: No. No, no, no. That’s the new Military Grey bit there, and that’s the dowdy, old, nasty Ocean Grey bit there. (beat) Or is it the other way around?

Truth be told, I still love those early Red Dwarf sets, and no amount of people who actually worked on the show slagging them off will change that. In particular, I think the endless permutations of the same basic sections did a really good job at selling the ship as something genuinely huge, and I don’t think this is acknowledged enough. I didn’t even mind the swing bin.

Ah, yes, the famous swing bin. Of all the elements made fun of with those first two series, this one is a perennial. You can see it in action during the very first episode, “The End” (TX: 15/2/88), in McIntyre’s funeral:

It is undeniable: McIntyre’s remains are blasted into space through the medium of a kitchen swing bin, built into a circular table-like object. The commentary on this scene in the 2007 DVD release The Bodysnatcher Collection is brutal:

DOUG NAYLOR: The idea of this is was that it’s supposed to be quite moving, wasn’t it?
ROB GRANT: Yeah, I liked this scene in the script, because it was tender, and a different tone.
DOUG NAYLOR: Yes, but obviously it’s not working as conceived? Now first of all…
ROB GRANT: The canister.
DOUG NAYLOR: The canister, and then the… kitchen bin.
ROB GRANT: Just fantastic! But he pressed that button good, that’s good button-pressing acting… I mean, what is that? It’s not even a good bin, is it?
DOUG NAYLOR: And because there’s nothing in the bottom of the kitchen bin, it just thuds to the bottom, and I think eventually they put tissues in so it didn’t make that terrible clanking noise.
ROB GRANT: Oh dear Lord.

The above scene did actually go out as part of the first episode. But our notorious swing bin also played a big part in what has become one of the most famous deleted scenes in the whole history of Red Dwarf. Shot during the original recording of the first episode, but cut from transmission, we see Lister trying to give a respectful send-off to the crew.

Rimmer’s “What a guy. What a sportsman” is one of the great lost lines of Red Dwarf, as far as I’m concerned. Swing bin or no.

So, what happened to our notorious prop, after the first episode was completed? Well, it hung around in the Drive Room set for the rest of the series, sometimes used as a table whenever the need arose:

Waiting for God

Confidence & Paranoia

But once those first six episodes were over, that was it. Series 1 was recorded at the tail end of 1987; when Series 2 started recording in May 1988, not only was our famous swing bin prop nowhere to be seen, but the entire Drive Room set had been replaced, with something rather less… grey.

Series 1 Drive Room

Series 2 Drive Room

Surely our swing bin was never to be seen again?

[Read more →]

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best of, red dwarf, red dwarf sets

Rapped Knuckles All Round

Published 5th July 2022

TV Comedy

I don’t spend all my time trying to prove people wrong on here, you know. Sometimes there’s joy in being able to prove somebody right, too.

Take this little anecdote about Yes Minister in Paul Eddington’s autobiography:

“There were rapped knuckles all round on one occasion. We had finished the recording one night and were waiting for the tape to be checked before the audience could be released and we could all go home when someone doing the checking noticed a slight mistake in one of Nigel’s long speeches.

The poor man came back with it all to do again, took a deep breath and did it, perfectly. We got our clearance and shot off home. But what no one had noticed was that since Nigel recorded the speech the first time there had been intervening scenes with costume changes, and Nigel was wearing the wrong tie. It was a viewer who spotted the mistake when the episode was shown.

– So Far, So Good, Paul Eddington, p.168

Unfortunately, Eddington doesn’t go into such piddling little details such as which episode he’s actually talking about. We’ll have to do the work for ourselves. Or at least cheat by grumpily searching Google.

Sure enough, “yes minister” bloopers tie comes up with the following IMDB entry. Apparently, during the Series 1 episode “Big Brother” (TX: 17/3/80)¹, “Sir Humphrey’s tie changes several times during one scene with Jim Hacker.”

“Several times” is an exaggeration. In fact, it changes once, and then back again, as we can see in this clip:

Humphrey’s “Yes, quite so, Minister” is the funniest part of the whole episode.

Anyway, we can clearly see the tie change for Hawthorne’s mildly difficult speech, and then change back again, indicating the reshoot. From blue and burgundy, to burgundy with white spots:

Tie in original scene, blue and burgundy

Original shoot

Reshoot

And what’s more, the errant tie genuinely is the same one as that worn in the final scene, indicating the reshoot took place exactly as described by Eddington:

Reshoot

Final scene

And there you have it. Proof that Paul Eddington wasn’t talking bollocks. Why bother fact-checking actual ministers who run the country, when I can fact-check pretend ones instead?

In all seriousness, though: it really is just as pleasurable for an anecdote to slip neatly into place as fact, as it is to prove somebody wrong. Poking away at these things isn’t an exercise in self-importance. The truth about something, no matter how inconsequential, is always worth striving for.

Yes, I’m no fun at parties, what’s your point?

[Read more →]

Just out of interest, the episode was recorded on the 13th January 1980, a shade under two months before transmission. ↩

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yes minister

John’ll Fix It

Published 22nd June 2022

Other TV

You may wonder why I have spent some time recently watching videos of Jimmy Savile on YouTube. This is a very good question, and one that I am unable to fully answer. I guess this is what happens when I get fed up of new Star Trek and get desperate for something to watch.

Nonetheless, here is yer evil bastard himself, on BBC2’s Open to Question in the 80s, being interrogated by a bunch of high school kids. Warning: video contains Jimmy Savile.

If you don’t want to watch the above – which is perfectly understandable – the below hilarious video condenses it down to three minutes. And while it’s clearly made partially for comedy purposes, it does accurately represent much of the content and feeling of the full interview:

Anyway, our question for today: when exactly was this interview broadcast?

[Read more →]

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tx date investigations

A Quiet Season

Published 5th June 2022

Meta / Videogames

For various reasons, I feel I need to take a bit of a break here on Dirty Feed. No, not a six month break. But I do want a bit of a rest from the endless posting. Partly because I’m a little burnt out with my job and need to clear my head, and partly because I want to spend some time researching and writing some more in-depth pieces than I’ve published on here of late.

So rather than leave you with an obnoxious and self-serving list of my own favourite articles on here as a holding pattern, instead I thought I’d link to a few other sites putting out some consistently good work. In particular: those writing about videogame history.

* * *

The Digital Antiquarian by Jimmy Maher
Some websites, like mine, simply post exactly what the writer feels like writing about at any given moment. Others are rather more ambitious. The Digital Antiquarian purports to be nothing less than “an historical chronicle of interactive entertainment”, in order. Of course, as I’m sure Jimmy Maher would be the first to admit, this historical chronicle is filtered through his own personal biases and interests. You won’t find much on consoles here, for instance, while every single game Infocom ever published gets its own article. This is very much not a problem.

The best place to start with the site isn’t on the front page: it’s the table of contents. You can either scroll down and pick the pieces which look interesting, or start right at the very beginning. One of my personal favourites is “What’s the Matter with Covert Action?”, about a game which I had never even heard of before I read the article, let alone played. You need precisely zero familiarity with the game in order to fully appreciate the argument the piece makes. And Jimmy’s writing really does go out of its way to avoid the boring, obvious arguments.

I love The Digital Antiquarian so much that I support Jimmy’s Patreon. If you have the means and enjoy the site, it might be worth doing the same.

All the Adventures by Jason Dyer
If the ambition of The Digital Antiquarian is startling, then the project All the Adventures is thoroughly ridiculous. Jason Dyer has promised nothing less than to “play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order”. There are hundreds of posts on the site already, and he’s only up to 1982. This might take a while.

Again, I highly suggest that you start on the chronological list of games rather than the front page, and see whether you want to skip around, or just start at the beginning. I especially loved his investigation into Time Zone – a famous, formidable, daunting game which I was never, ever, ever going to play… but sure loved reading someone else doing the hard work instead.

Revs on the BBC Micro by Mark Moxon
My last suggestion is a little different from the others. For a start, it’s far more technical – perhaps impenetrably so for many. But blame the old BBC Micro user in me, I find it utterly irresistible.¹

The Beeb got a surprising amount of highly innovative games, considering its reputation among some people; Elite, Exile, and Aviator, to name but three. Some of those games are even covered elsewhere on the site I’m linking to here. But I was particularly taken by Mark Moxon’s articles about Revs, an extremely early racing sim. Mark’s work actually involves a complete documentation of the source code of the game, which I’m sure is fascinating for those people it’s aimed at, but for me it’s the articles which make the whole thing accessible to the lay person, albeit the technically-minded lay person.

My favourite piece on the whole site is this examination of the custom screen mode in Revs, which is the kind of thing I had a vague kind of idea about, but not how complex it actually was. It’s such a delight to find out brand new things about something decades old. While some people sit there pretending to write, it’s people like Mark who are calmly getting shit done.

* * *

I’ve only scratched the surface here of the fun stuff going on in retro gaming right now. There’s the Video Game History Foundation, who recently published this search for an important female pioneer in gaming. There’s The Genesis Temple, which takes a particular look at the oft-forgotten European side of gaming. There’s also the superlative 50 Years of Text Games, with the quite astonishing tale behind Silverwolf. I really do mean utterly astonishing. And so on and so on, across what must be hundreds of sites. And I’ve not even started on all the various podcasts or YouTube.

There seems to me right now to be some extraordinary work going in terms of retro gaming, both in terms of analysis, and pure software preservation. There has been for years, of course, but I feel it more than ever right now. In fact, I might almost be tempted to use that dreaded phrase “golden age”. If you want to know all about the games of your childhood – or even the games of somebody else’s childhood – there’s a quite astonishing amount of material out there.

So there you go. Plenty to be getting on with away from here. I hope at least one of the sites above is new to you. As for this place, the fact that this post has been a struggle to write, when it’s literally just a few links bunged together, probably tells you all you need to know about how well my brain is working at the moment.

See you on the other side. Toodle-oo.

Old time BBC Micro users will get the headine of this article, for instance. Yes, Yellow River Kingdom… ↩

Medium, Message, Etc

Published 29th May 2022

TV Comedy

Right now, I’m buried in a load of research on early Spitting Image. In particular, I have been carefully examining an original off-air of Series 1, Episode 11 (TX: 10/6/84), for reasons which will prove extremely interesting. But we’ll get to that in its own sweet time.

Instead, I want to talk about the two sketches in this episode before and after the ad break. Before the break we get our very first look at the puppet of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had hitherto just been heard off-screen. After the break, we get the ad parody “There’s an indifference at McGregor’s you’ll enjoy”, about the contemporary head of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor. The miner’s strike had started just three months previously.

Below is the sequence as presented on the DVD, released in 2008:

The link the sketch draws between the Scottish-American MacGregor, and applying certain American business practices to the UK, gives it a little more depth than a fair number of ad parodies manage.

While it’s obvious that the McGregor’s sketch is a McDonald’s parody, and of a very famous ad campaign which had been running for years, it’s still startling to compare an ad from the actual campaign, and realise the jingle really is virtually identical.

Finally, let’s take a look at this sequence in Spitting Image as it originally transmitted – ad break fully intact – on LWT in 1984:

And all of a sudden, what the production was doing with the McGregor’s sketch is obvious. By putting it at the start of Part Two, it’s right up against a load of other ads, and feels part of them. I highly suspect that it’s only the Spitting Image logo at the beginning keeping the thing compliant with IBA rules. What was merely amusing on DVD starts to feel genuinely subversive when viewed in its originally broadcast form.

Now sure, if you’re actually thinking about the material, you could make the link anyway. It is easy to forget that back in 1984, you didn’t tend to get trailers for other programmes during the centre ad breaks like you do now, which would completely ruin the effect. But if you did remember that, you could easily put two and two together and understand what the programme was up to.

But it’s one thing knowing that logically. It’s another actually seeing the effect it has on the show. It’s the difference between having merely having the facts at your disposal, and feeling them. Original off-airs for Series 1 of Spitting Image are very difficult to come by. Things like this give me a new appreciation for just how cheeky the show was being at this point.

And it’s a reminder that when making comedy, you need to consider how everything feeds into it. Context is vital. If you can get the format of your chosen medium to add meaning which is impossible to achieve in any other way, then so much the better.

With thanks to Nigel Hill for the original recording of this episode of Spitting Image.

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